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Saturday, October 4, 2008

This and That

Yesterday was a no-output day, which was unwise considering Julie my shadow weave client is in town this weekend to pick up the scarf, (not her primary reason for being in Nelson, mind,) and I still had 110cm to weave - about two days' worth - on the table loom. But I spent the day hazily thinking about the next wall, as well as the towels. After looking at half a dozen books, I went to Handweaving.net to look for inspiring 16-end drafts suitable for towels, and saw a few, but didn't download anything yet.

I suddenly remembered something. Years ago when Dr Griswold was well and I discovered his web site at Univ of Arizona, (which is where Dad worked in 1963), I had a brief correspondence with the good doctor, and promised I'd read all of his original articles, which I found amusing. He was a mathematician, as you know, and I found his perspective on weaving so foreign. Those days, I think there may have been about 10 or a dozen of his articles, so I thought I could handle the task.

Well, last night, I went over to the archives section of Kris Bruland's excellent website and searched by author and, whoa!, there were so many attributed to Dr Griswold. Past experience told me some files attributed to him are indeed books he uploaded, so I checked the page numbers and previewed files under 10 pages, or where the title sounded suspiciously mathematical and started downloading.

Sometime around 11.30PM, the system shut down and the web site said "Inactive Account". I've seen this before; Kris is a techie and he's set up his web site so strange programs can't download the entire content of his web site. So, suspecting I was downloading indiscriminately, my IP address got kicked out. This happened a few years ago also when I think I was downloading a whole heap of drafts. He fixed it and from memory exempted my IP address at that time. Meanwhile our ISP changed our IP address without our knowledge a few months ago, so now I'm kicked out again! (The original Arizona web site doesn't have the search-by-criteria capability.)

When this happens I can't email Kris, I can't contact him via his web site, so I had Nancy contact him from her computer explaining my predicament, and I'm just hoping he'll see it in the next little while, but otherwise, people, I have to come up with something exciting on my own.

Meanwhile, I did manage to weave the 110cm today. My back became so sore I was feeling cross, but the result is so subtle, exactly what Julie wanted. Because the two grays were rather close in value and because there's so short a distance to beat on a table loom, I think I packed the wefts in a closer than I planned, so the scarf is the spongiest (and largest) cashmere scarf yet. Some parts of the lighter yarn was spun erratically and appear almost as dark as the darker gray, so there is one part towards one edge where it looks like I made a mistake and wove D-D-D, but I didn't. Honest.

I'm delivering it to Julie at 9AM tomorrow morning; she told me she even brought a black dress and boots to go with this scarf so she's going to wear that tomorrow when she meets me. Now if that doesn't makes this weaver flattered/intimidated/flustered/embarrassed, I don't know what does!